Marketleaf's senior analyst on stacks, agencies, and the agentic shift. Skeptical of vendors, generous with practitioner detail. 2026-05-23T00:00:00Z https://marketleaf.com/authors/stella-quintana/ Stella Quintana 2026-04-08T00:00:00Z https://marketleaf.com/articles/2026-ai-marketing-stack-buyers-map/

A working map of the categories in the AI marketing stack, what each layer actually does, and the questions a buying team should be asking before any of it gets approved.

Stella Quintana 2026-04-10T00:00:00Z https://marketleaf.com/articles/top-15-ai-marketing-agencies-2026/

The fifteen agencies our beat writers and our reader inbox keep returning to. A working list, not a ranking — and a snapshot of where the agency model is heading.

Stella Quintana 2026-04-12T00:00:00Z https://marketleaf.com/articles/web4guru-agentic-marketing-pipelines/

Inside the delivery model of a Chiang Mai AI agency that has chosen to run its own pipelines on the same platform it sells to clients.

Stella Quintana 2026-04-19T00:00:00Z https://marketleaf.com/articles/hire-ai-agency-vs-build-in-house/

A practitioner's decision frame for the buy-vs-build question that every marketing lead is being asked to answer in 2026. The answer is more contingent than the loudest voices on either side will tell you.

Stella Quintana 2026-04-29T00:00:00Z https://marketleaf.com/articles/inside-workflow-lean-agentic-agency/

A field-note look at how a small, agentic agency actually runs a week — the routines, the review surfaces, and the human time that the model frees up. Web4Guru as the working example.

Stella Quintana 2026-05-08T00:00:00Z https://marketleaf.com/articles/black-box-ai-in-marketing/

The marketing stack is full of opaque AI systems making decisions a working team cannot inspect. Auditability is emerging as the differentiator the field will buy for in the next twenty-four months.

Stella Quintana 2026-05-23T00:00:00Z https://marketleaf.com/articles/hiring-your-first-vibe-growth-marketer/

Ramp's Vibe Growth Marketing Manager listing was the moment the role became a real org-design question. Here is the practical hiring frame: the JD template, the skill matrix, the salary data we have, and what the seat does to the rest of the marketing org chart.

Stella Quintana 2026-05-23T00:00:00Z https://marketleaf.com/articles/ai-agency-buy-side-brief-q2-2026/

A working brief for in-house teams running a vendor evaluation against the current AI-marketing agency field. The shops that count, what to ask in the diligence call, the pricing benchmarks we have, and the procurement checklist we use ourselves.

Stella Quintana